Waste Strategy

We are commencing work on a new Waste Strategy. The Strategy is being developed to consider how Council delivers its waste services, consider access to services across the LGA, to develop appropriate pricing structures and to look at improving waste management.

As part of this project we are establishing a Waste Strategy Working Group. The working group will assist in the development of a new Waste Management Strategy. Council has sought expressions of interest for two residential users from urban areas, two residential users from rural areas and two business and industry users, along with councillors and staff.

Expressions of interest have now closed. Successful applications are expected to be announced in the near future.

There will be four meetings of the working group which are expected to occur within the next 8 months. The meetings will generally be up to four hours in duration and may be conducted during or outside business hours.

The first meeting will review a background paper and provide assistance in developing the approach to the first round of community consultation. The second meeting will review the consultation outcomes, review options arising from consultation and select options for inclusion in the draft strategy. The third meeting will review the draft strategy and financial model prior to it being released for community consultation and the final meeting will review the consultation outcomes and finalise the strategy and financial model for presentation to Council.

Council conducted this audit to update its characterisation of bin streams, plan for future services and provide additional data for 'eligible containers' in the Container Deposit Scheme (CDS). This was the first audit conducted of the amalgamated Councils of Oueanbeyan and Palerang. It was also the first audit since the introduction of the CDS, also known as Return and Earn, which commenced on 1 December 2017.

This audit was generally designed to conform to the NSW residential waste auditing guidelines known as the "NSW EPA (previous OEH) Guidelines" or the "Guidelines for Conducting Household Kerbside Residual Waste, Recycling and Garden Organics Audits in NSW Local Government Areas" (NSW EPA, 2008) and "Addendum 2010" (NSW EPA, 2010).

This involved:

A target sample size of 264 households.

Matched waste and recycling bins sampled in 2-bin system areas. This means the pair of waste and recycling bins were collected from the same household that presented both streams. For 3-bin system areas, the organics bin was targeted at the same households in the alternative collection week of the collection fortnight cycle.

The objective of this audit was to provide the data indicators for: generation rate by weight when a bin is presented; generation rate by volume; unrecovered resources in the waste bin; contamination rate; resource recovery rate; diversion rate; and eligible CDS containers. It also provided a comparison with the previous audit years.